Goldin proves that it’s possible to do high-quality research on gender issues and not play politics.
I wrote a while ago about the misconception that people in the olden days got married very young. Research shows that, at least in Western Europe and the United States, age of first marriage for women is roughly U-shaped if plotted on a graph between 1800 and today. Today’s age of first marriage is unusually high, but the age of first marriage for women in the 1960s was unusually low, and it shouldn’t be considered a standard to which society must return.
In light of Claudia Goldin’s winning the Nobel Prize in economics, it’s worth noting that female labor-force participation follows the same U-shaped pattern. Goldin is an economic historian, and much of her research is on the history of female employment. The rise in female labor-force participation over the past few decades followed a previous decline in female labor-force participation.
As David Henderson of the Hoover Institution wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Goldin is not an ideologue, and her research is widely admired by economists for its focus on getting the facts right, not making policy pronouncements. Her work on the wage gap between men and women is the furthest thing from the fashionable progressive insistence that the existence of a difference is prima facie proof of malevolent discrimination. Goldin explains the choices and trends that lead to different outcomes and has been hesitant to get involved in political issues.
As Alex Tabarrok notes, Goldin studied under two of the top economists of the past few decades, Alfred Kahn (who probably did more to advance deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s than any other economist) and Robert Fogel (who won the Nobel Prize himself for economic history). Tabarrok’s post contains videos and links to other articles explaining her research, if you’re interested in learning more.
Goldin’s work on female labor-force participation finds that women left the labor force in the 1800s and then have returned since the 1960s. That’s contrary to the popular narrative that every woman stayed at home in the olden days and only recently have women worked for the first time.
As economist Maia Mindel explains on her Substack, summarizing Goldin’s research, everyone was involved in the labor force in the primarily agricultural society of the 1800s. Even women in the urban areas that existed at that time worked a lot. It wasn’t until industrialization that “home life” and “work life” became separate spheres. “As wages rose due to industrialization, it made sense to specialize: someone had to do domestic labor, while someone else had to do labor outside the house,” Mindel writes. It was at that point, in the second half of the 1800s, that women gradually left the workforce and became homemakers.
“As incomes get higher and people get more educated, female labor opportunities get better, and the opportunity cost of staying at home cooking versus working becomes higher than the cost of buying appliances or hiring a nanny,” Mindel writes. Those trends began taking hold in the 1960s, as more women went to college and labor-saving household appliances became cheaper and more widespread, and women gradually reentered the labor force.
We see the same trend in comparisons between countries. The countries with the highest female-labor-force participation rates today are either extremely poor or extremely rich, Mindel writes. And Goldin’s research shows that “the labor force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop.”
Like the age of first marriage, female labor-force participation in the 1950s and 1960s was at a historical low point, not a historical norm. The causes of the low point have a lot to do with the economics of industrialization and not very much to do with adherence to traditional values. We’ve seen the same pattern play out in countries around the world, with different cultural and religious backgrounds.
It was good to see the Nobel Prize given to an economist who focuses on the facts and doesn’t play politics with research. Goldin proves that it’s possible to do high-quality research on gender issues, and the hyper-progressives who have hijacked much of the academic study of gender issues do a disservice to everyone. “I am struck by how little Goldin is willing to speculate, pontificate or advocate in that conversation and instead sticks to the data,” Tabarrok writes. More in academia should follow her example.